Many of the catastrophic and non-catastrophic component failures that occur in motor vehicles are preceded by subtle warnings. These warnings often take the form of vibrations and noise over a wide spectrum of frequency. They can result in pinpoint anticipation of failure and efficient preventive maintenance of the vehicle, if detected by a person who is skillful enough to understand them. Many factors militate against this detection and proper interpretation by the operator, by skilled mechanics, or by modern mechanical and electronic diagnostic equipment. One factor is, of course, that many of the warning signals only occur when the vehicle is in operation and, more specifically, under particular stress or other operating conditions. This situation makes it difficult to command occurence of the signal at the time when its detection and interpretation are easiest. Another factor is that modern car design includes the extensive use of sound damping and insulation to isolate the driving compartment from engine, drive-train, and wheel noise. Thus, even if the operator is skilled enough to discriminate between normal operating noise and warning signals and thereafter to interpret the warning signals, his opportunity to hear the noise at all is severely limited in modern automobiles. The last factor is that the modern operator is normally not a skilled mechanic and, even if he could hear the operating noise of the automobile, he would not have the ear to distinguish what is normal from what is not, nor the experience to interpret the abnormal signals. These and other difficulties experienced by prior art methods have been obviated in a novel manner by the present invention.
It is, therefore, an outstanding object of the invention to provide an automobile warning system which is sensitive to the vibration and noise warning system generated by the operating components of a vehicle and which indicates to the operator the presence and nature of these signals.
Another object of this invention is the provision of an automobile warning system which provides for the placement of remote sensors at various strategic locations about the vehicle.
A further object of the present invention is the provision of an automobile warning system, including a signal modification system which removes extraneous matter from the signal generated by the tranducers and modifies the remaining signal into a more useful form.
A still further object of the invention is the provision of an automobile warning system, including a display device which presents pertinent data from the sensors to the operator at his command.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an automobile warning system which presents the pre-failure warning signals in a form which can be understood by an operator with minimum interpretative skills.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide an automobile warning system which is both simple and inexpensive to manufacture and operate.
Another object of the invention is the provision of an automobile warning system which is flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of vehicles, to be sensitive to a wide range of pre-failure warning signals, and to be capable of a wide range of modifications on the signals generated by the sensors.
With these and other objects in view, as will be apparent to those skilled in the art, the invention resides in the combination of parts set forth in the specification and covered by the claims appended hereto.